ProSoundWeb: Computer software has made the job of audio engineering much easier on the tech of today. From SPL prediction software to room dimension and aspect ratio matching, finding the right loudspeaker to cover an audience or figuring out how to work with the gear that you have efficiently can be a quick process and a lot of fun.
2 comments:
I love the term "old school math" to describe really quite basic trigonometry. In the way olden days, there were trig slide rulers that were designed to take in side lengths and compute angles. Some of those older analog calculators are incredibly interesting in their mechanization, and I personally would like to see them make a comeback. The most interesting part of this article was the last example about if you have a gap in your sound system. The fix is really simple, and makes sense if you think about sound in terms of light. Here's what I mean by that: Speakers emit a cone of sound, and one can figure out how that cone of sound can be affected by various things if one imagines the cone as a beam or shaft of light. Things like the field of sound follow the same basic inverse square law that lighting fixtures do, and I really love how it's possible to come up with solutions to problems by thinking of the senses in different ways.
This was a good read! I feel that unless you’re directly involved in sound work of some sort, it’s easy to forget how precise sound can be planned out. That is to say, we have a very simple understanding of how sound works: a speaker will make sound in the direction it’s facing, and it gets quieter the farther away you are. The amount of precision that can go into speaker placement is sort of surprising. It’s funny that their “old-school math” is something that every high school student will learn. I was surprised myself to see how simple the math was; I had guessed logarithms would be in there because of frequency, but I guess it makes sense to use only the high end response since high frequency dissipates more easily. I do wonder, however, how more complex system designs take frequency into account, if at all. I would imagine that on a different scale frequency would play a bigger role than this article suggests.
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